Turning Misery Into Ministry

Turning Misery Into Ministry

When we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your benefit and salvation! For when God comforts us, it is so that we, in turn, can be an encouragement to you. Then you can patiently endure the same things we suffer. We are confident that as you share in suffering, you will also share God’s comfort. –2 Corinthians 1:6-7

It was literally the Mother’s Day of a lifetime. The only Mother’s Day I would have with Hope. She was five months old, and I wanted to enjoy the gift of having her for this Mother’s Day rather than focus on the reality that it would be our only one together, which it was.

As that day approached, and as I anticipated the mixture of joy and pain the day would bring for me, I began to think of people around me—people I knew who had lost their mothers that year and faced their first Mother’s Day without their mother. I thought of those who had lost children and felt the void especially on that day. There were those who, like me, had children who would not live until the next Mother’s Day and those who had never been able to conceive or carry a child successfully.

So I made a list and went to the store to buy Mother’s Day cards. It’s not easy to find a selection of cards for men who’ve lost their mothers or mothers who’ve lost children, so I had to improvise. But I sent out a big stack. Early Mother’s Day morning, I called a woman in my church whose mother had died of breast cancer the month before. Then at church that morning, I looked over and saw a woman with four small children whose husband had recently left her. I walked over and wished her happy Mother’s Day, telling her that I thought she was an incredible mother to her children. It seemed to matter. And my sorrow seemed to lift.

God often uses sorrow in our lives to open our eyes to the pain of others and to equip us to comfort them. Something good happens when we get our eyes off our own pain and minister out of it to hurting people. In the midst of comforting others through the power of the Holy Spirit, we find the comfort we crave.

Comforter, sometimes I feel so desperate to find something to soothe my heart and mind but I find no relief. Open my eyes to the hurts of those around me so that I can turn the misery in my life into ministry by comforting others.

DIGGING DEEPER